Zama

April 25, 2018 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 p.m.

Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a man out of time. Trapped in Argentina, the land of his birth, and serving at the whims of a foreign crown, he embodies the role of colonizer as a middle-aged, corporate functionary–bored, horny, witless, and incompetent. He waits and waits for a promised transfer to reunite with his wife and child, and then waits some more. When he finally does take action, volunteering to join an expedition to find and kill the notorious bandit Vicuña Porto, this adventure too is folly that ends only in further humiliation.

Lucrecia Martel’s Zama resolves few of the episodes she selected to adapt from Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name. Instead, she ensnares viewers in a similarly unnerving stasis. Characters enter Zama’s life–three lovely sisters, a visiting merchant called “The Oriental,” the local noblewoman Luciana (Lola Dueñas)–and then vanish again. Throughout, Martel keeps her camera fixed on Cacho’s endlessly fascinating expression, which articulates Zama’s growing frustration, exhaustion, and self-hatred. “All the close-ups of Zama with all those surrounding voices created that idea of his interior monologue,” Martel has said. It’s the maddening voice of our demented world.

“I might call the film a delirium, but Martel is too precise for that, and too harshly satirical. You might rather think of this work as a landscape film, whose softly colored, picturesque surface is disturbed here and there by grubby fools.” — The Nation

“The tender surrender of the trajectory feels just right. In the end, Zama is reduced (or redeemed) as a sightseer, and so are we—and to see through the eyes of Lucrecia Martel is to submit to truly lucid dreaming.” — Reverse Shot

About the Filmmaker

Zama is the fourth feature film by Lucrecia Martel, after writing and directing The Headless Woman (2008), The Holy Girl (2004) and La Cienaga (2001). Her films have been acclaimed at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, New York, Sundance and Rotterdam, amongst other major festivals. Retrospectives of her work have been hosted by prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Berkeley and the Tate Museum. She has served on numerous festival juries and has delivered masterclasses around the world.